I will present a study that explores how people use speech, gestures, and drawings to describe kinship systems, focusing on whether these multimodal representations reveal consistent patterns tied to social structures. Specifically, it examines the Paamese people of Vanuatu, a relatively understudied community in cognitive science. In semi-structured interviews, 40 Paamese speakers discussed their families, using both gestures and drawings to complement their verbal descriptions. Analyses show that speakers consistently lateralize kinship relationships: family members from the mother's side are placed on the left, and those from the father's side on the right in the speaker's gesture space. Additionally, gestures describing marital relationships frequently align along two diagonal directions of the sagittal axis, a pattern mirrored in the few diagrams participants drew on the ground. These findings suggest that Paamese speakers rely on a spatial template to think about and communicate kinship relations. I will argue that extending investigations of kinship structures beyond kinship terminologies alone and including other semiotic systems like hand gestures can reveal additional dimensions of how people cognitively represent and communicate social structures, offering new insights into the diversity of kinship systems.

Devylder, S., Hinnel, J., van de Weijer, J., Brink Andersen, L., Laporte‐Devylder, L., & Kulukul, H. K. T. (2024). Kin cognition and communication: What talking, gesturing, and drawing about family can tell us about the way we think about this core social structure. Cognitive Science, 48(9), e13484.